Professor Bob Pattinson is the director of the MRC Maternal and Infant Health Care Strategies Research Unit.  He served on the National Committee for the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths and the National Perinatal Morbidity and Mortality Committee in South Africa and compiled and edited their reports.  He was responsible for perinatal care and child health care surveys in South Africa.  His main research interests are in obstetrics, medical audits, health systems and effective methods of outreach.  His main research focus is on determining the most effective strategies and the means of implementing these new health care strategies and improving current programmes.  Recently the scale-up of the Essential Steps in Managing Obstetric Emergencies and Emergency Obstetric Simulation Training programme has been completed.  This programme demonstrated a 25% reduction in maternal mortality before and after its implementation in 12 districts in South Africa. Current clinical research is focusing on predicting and preventing stillbirths and integrating a health package for the first 1000 days of life. This has led to a major breakthrough in detecting fetal growth restriction and preventing stillbirths using continuous-wave Doppler by screening a low-risk pregnant population. This has also led to identifying vulnerable neonates and infants at risk of stunting and poor neurodevelopment. This discovery opens the door for treating in-utero fetuses at risk of developing non-communicable diseases (such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and stroke) later in life and identifying them for special management in infancy. In January 2021, he had published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and his H-Index rating in 50 with (95 articles quoted 10 or more times in the last 5 years and overall 143 articles have been cited more than 10 times).